The centre, which will receive €2m of funding from the university over the next five years, will take the form of an umbrella organisation that coordinates relevant research activities from the university's institutes of chemistry, biomolecular sciences and biotechnology.

The new research centre is the result of an increasing number of collaborations over the last ten years in the field of synthetic biology. These research groups often consist of researchers from chemistry, biology and engineering, all of whom are involved in creating new biological systems - such as the components of a cell - to a man made design.

"Classical biology aims to uncover the intricacies of cells, whereas in synthetic biology we introduce new pathways to build new medicine," says Professor Bert Poolman, the director of the new centre. The ultimate dream of synthetic biology is to be able to create a whole cell from scratch, although scientists are still some way from achieving this.

Much of this research involves the creation of new biological components - or BioBricks- to build these newly designed systems. For example, natural proteins are made from a sequence of 20 different amino acids, but synthetic biologists have now designed and created a range of artificial amino acids which form the building blocks for new proteins used in medicine.

"Researchers have synthesised peptides using these amino acids for therapeutic purposes which are more stable - they are not rapidly degraded, so we can work with lower dosages to achieve a similar effect," says Poolman. "The efficiency of this production is low, and there are still some technological challenges. We would like to make it a more robust tool."

The research performed at the new research centre will focus on three main activities. Some of the researchers plan to engineer cells to produce antibiotics and other biological products in large quantities. Researchers at the centre will also aim to find new ways of successfully delivering drugs to the sites of the body that need the treatment, avoiding the body's defences that can degrade the drugs and decrease the effectiveness of the treatment. Another direction of the centre's research will be to produce new biosensors and biochips using a synthetic biology approach.

Four different research groups will initially work on these problems. The university funding should pay for five new members to join the university within each group, but additional funding, from the EU and the government, could contribute another 10-15 PhD students and post-doctoral researchers to the teams. At the moment the University has the equivalent of 89.5 full-time researchers dedicated to synthetic biology, so the addition of 60-80 new researchers should significantly strengthen its work in this area.

"It's a significant growth on what we already have," says Poolman. "It's a hot area, and we hope lots of things will come out of this."